O.J.'s slow-speed chase opened a new world

Updated 11:42 pm, Monday, June 9, 2014

The NBA Finals are happening. The Rangers are playing for the Stanley Cup. The World Cup is about to begin.

If all this sounds strangely familiar, you might expect to see a white Bronco on the L.A. freeways sometime soon.

This is the 20th anniversary of the weirdest year in the history of sports, the year that changed the place of sports in our culture and catapulted it into the cult of celebrity and 24/7 coverage that we have today.

Next week will be the anniversary of what some consider the tipping point in that evolution. June 17, 1994, was already an extraordinary day: The Rangers had a victory parade in Manhattan to celebrate winning the Stanley Cup. The World Cup opened in Chicago - the world's biggest sporting event being staged in a country that barely noticed soccer up to that point. Arnold Palmer was playing his last ever round of golf in the U.S. Open. The Knicks and Rockets would play Game 5 of the NBA Finals.

That was all overshadowed by O.J. Simpson's ride down the freeway in a white Bronco.

The day was so noteworthy that ESPN made a "30 for 30" documentary about it. The director, Brett Morgen, describes the day as "a turning point where we became more of a celebrity-obsessed tabloid culture. It changed the way we view our sports personalities."

It did, but I would argue that the change already had begun, pushed along by an earlier event in crazy 1994. The Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan scandal that unfolded at the figure-skating championships in Detroit and then the Winter Olympics in Norway was as bizarre a story as anyone could ever concoct. There was a character named Gillooly, a Keystone Kops plot, a telescopic baton, massive crowds watching Harding practice skating or Kerrigan leave her house. At the Olympics, sports reporters squashed into a small holding pen at a practice in a cold Hamar skating rink, shoulder to shoulder with Connie Chung and People magazine reporters. Every element of the story seemed surreal.

It seemed that from that point, the unpredictable became routine. A few months later Michael Jackson married Elvis Presley's daughter. That autumn, the World Series was canceled. Nelson Mandela became South Africa's president. They finished digging a tunnel so you could drive from France to England in half an hour. If you had said any of those things a few years earlier, people would have thought you were crazy.

But nothing was as crazy as the Simpson story. On June 12, 1994, his ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman were murdered. Simpson was charged with their murders, but on June 17, he failed to turn himself in to the Los Angeles police as scheduled.

As the day unfolded, at one point Simpson's attorney, Robert Kardashian, read a letter that sounded very much like a suicide note. As Kardashian spoke to the media mob, he was surely unaware he was helping to create a world of which his then-teenage daughters would become the queens.

Early that evening, Simpson got into a Bronco piloted by his friend Al Cowlings. Helicopter-borne television crews picked it up on the freeway and began following it. And the world couldn't stop watching.

I was in a hotel room in Detroit, there to cover the next day's World Cup game between the United States and Switzerland. I turned on the television to watch the NBA Finals, but instead found myself watching the "picture in picture" box of the white Bronco. Just like 95 million other people. It was compelling, bizarre, suspenseful.

"It created an appetite for reality television," Morgen said. "It was reality television."

And the NBA Finals couldn't compete with it. Even in Madison Square Garden, huge swaths of seats were empty, because fans were watching the chase on television. NBC debated whether to cut away from the game, settling instead on the split screen. Even the players on the floor became aware that Simpson was on the run.

This was in the days before social media. The Internet was in its infancy. The fact that the police were talking to Simpson in the Bronco on "a cellular phone" was noteworthy enough to be mentioned in news reports.

Yet even without those tools that bind us together now, the news spread quickly. People gathered not only in front of their television sets but also on freeway overpasses in Los Angeles to watch the Bronco slip past them. One can only imagine what it would be like today, on Twitter.

The chase didn't end until late in the night, East Coast time. The American soccer players in their hotel stayed up late watching, despite an early game the next day.

The obsession with Simpson didn't end. The murder trial the next year was must-see TV, a daily soap opera that brought in huge ratings for CNN and other cable networks. But by that point, we weren't surprised by anything. We were already living in a world that had changed.

"This is one of those cases where you just can't believe that reality is real," one television newscaster said during Simpson's long ride.

But it was in 1994, the weirdest year in sports, when the preposterous became the norm.

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